Crowdsourced Agenda for Free Expression

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Internet users from across the globe have come together to create a crowdsourced vision for free expression online. Over 300,000 people from 155 countries worldwide helped shape our roadmap for a Digital Future that includes us all.

Dive into the Report:

At its best, the Internet encourages us to share, use our creativity, and express ourselves freely. It fosters the same key experiences that help us preserve our imaginations and our capacity to learn as we grow from children into adults. What we’ve heard from the hundreds of thousands of Internet users worldwide who have participated in OpenMedia’s projects is that the Internet has the power to bring people together around these common learning experiences and shared values.

While media conglomerate interventions in copyright and intellectual property law have envisioned (and sometimes created) regimes where the needs of these conglomerates trump the possibilities of the open Internet, our crowdsourcing participants envision a regime where both sharing and creativity flourish. From their input, and the many other elements of the “Our Digital Future” process, we’ve distilled three key recommendations.

We believe in respect for artists. Having a fair and flexible copyright system means that artists can make a living off their work, while users have the freedom to share, collaborate and create online.

Citizens, particularly young people, are increasingly questioning the legitimacy and effectiveness of traditional models of governance and hierarchical processes of decision-making; a new method befitting the era of participation is sorely needed.

When it comes to government decisions that will affect all of us, OpenMedia doesn’t just want a seat at the table – instead, we actively work to put citizens at the center of government decision-making, and our own decision-making as an organization. In order to include as broad a community as possible in the conversation about copyright laws, we came up with several online engagement tools and strategies that were as simple and user-friendly as possible.